I've been messing around with skills and have learned a lot... Tough I'm having some frame skipping problems with a barbarian ancient summon skill... I have made it based on shadowmaster IA and the skill itself works fine but:

1 - The barb becomes invisible when moving, and shows up to attack... This also happens when I apply the shapeshift state to some hireling, so it looks like the barb ancient... I thought it shoulb be realy the images missing, but when I use the costume state on the character, it becomes a perfect barbancy... I can walk around and attack normaly and every image and seq is right... So, what is the problem with the summon and is there a way to make a ancient summon skill working nicely?

2 - is there a way to summon 3 monsters at once from a singke skill? Or make the summoned monster random from some pre selected monsters?

3 - What would be the more agressive badass IA to put on a barbarian or even other summon, to make it attack like crazy and seek for monsters? Shadow IA is a lazy bastard...

Thank you... Soft or hardcoded solutions are welcome.. And sorry the bad english...

Hand-picked

1. Madawc lacks a RN animation, and the Shadow Master tends to run a lot, so what you need to do is to clone his walking (WL) animations COF and DCC and rename them as RN. After that, edit AnimData by cloning madawc's token WLHTH and rename it to RNHTH

2. Yes, and it's the hydra skill function: What you actually do with Hydra is summoning three differet hydras, because the skill summons your 'summon' from skills + the next two ID's taken from MonStats.txt

3. Shadowmaster's AI is actually awesome and can perform many roles, including what you seek look at the guide for its AI in my signature, it will explain how to properly set it (the guide needs a bit of polishing because I discovered new stuffs since last time I updated it, but I can say it's quite solid for your purposes).

3b. Since you mention "hardcoded" solutions, I suggest you to check my mini-guide about fixing the Shadow Master's AI targeting to make it less annoying

1. Madawc lacks a RN animation, and the Shadow Master tends to run a lot, so what you need to do is to clone his walking (WL) animations COF and DCC and rename them as RN. After that, edit AnimData by cloning madawc's token WLHTH and rename it to RNHTH

3. Shadowmaster's AI is actually awesome and can perform many roles, including what you seek look at the guide for its AI in my signature, it will explain how to properly set it (the guide needs a bit of polishing because I discovered new stuffs since last time I updated it, but I can say it's quite solid for your purposes).

3b. Since you mention "hardcoded" solutions, I suggest you to check my mini-guide about fixing the Shadow Master's AI targeting to make it less annoying

Hey, I tried exactly what you directed about the token cloning. Madawc continues to disappear though.
-My steps were first to use mpqeditor to open d2exp.mpq.
-Went to data/ global/monsters/OF and extracted. I then placed file into data/ global/monsters/OF.
-I proceeded to enter Cof folder and cloned 0FWLHTH.COF and changed to 0FRNHTH.COF.
-Went into S2 folder, cloned 0FS2LITWLHTH.dcc and changed to 0FS2LITRNHTH.dcc.
-Went to TR folder, cloned 0FTRLITWLHTH.dcc and changed to 0FTRLITRNHTH.dcc.
-Opened Animdata_edit and extracted from animdata.d2
-used d2excel to animdata.txt, cloned 0FWLHTH and changed clone to 0FRNHTH.
-I saved my worked, went back to animdata_edit folder, clicked pack, and then used mpqeditor to place Animdata.d2 into data/global/.
-that did not work because everytime he locked onto enemy, he would disappear until he reaches them and then fights as normal until he moves onto next.

I also tried placing file directly in data/global folder since I am using d2se with use data folder before mpq setting. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: I figured out what my issue was. I never activated mRN to 1 in monstats2. As soon as I did, who ran as normal!

UPDATE: Now the problem I am having is that Madawc will not actually cast any abilities except a double swing attack. He has shout already in his monstats entry, but will not cast it. I am sure it has something to do with Shadow Master Ai. What do you think?